Bill Stewart gets a lot of grief for the sometimes meandering manner of his press conferences. Sometimes we get confused trying to follow along and sort sense from nonsense. Quite often, there’s a good point lost in translation. 

Fortunately, there’s value in Decoding Bill Stewart. This week, WVU’s head coach is asked about sophomore safety Terence Garvin and how he’s come of age so quickly. Stewart illustrates his reply with recollections of walks with Steve Dunlap, club-footed linebackers, Ts and Is and where one can find Sidney Glover.

From Tuesday’s press conference

Question: “Bill, you have a number of linebackers that are really good defenders on your team. Generally linebackers lead the team in tackling. You have a sophomore safety doing that now. Unusual or with him is he a bit unusual in that he’s developing pretty rapidly?”

Answer: “Very savvy football player. I’ve talked to, Coach Dunlap and I, we took a chance to walk yesterday, didn’t get to do much today¹. But Terence Garvin is who you’re speaking about² and Terence Garvin is in a hit position at his position and he’s doing very, very well. And our guys are playing hard, but it seems like maybe the scheme is funneling tackles to him and stuff and that’s pretty good³.

“I told Anthony Leonard last night on the sideline how proud I was – he was our player of the game this week⁴ – how far that kid’s come. He was written off. ‘Your feet are too slow.’ ‘You’re too, you’re club-footed⁵.’ ‘You know, you’re not Reed Williams.’

“Well, he’s just proven that if you just pay your dues and you pay attention to detail and you cross your ts and dot your is⁶, which as a football team we did not do. We did not cross our ts and dot our is. OK? ⁷ And we’re one of a bunch that it happened to in the country.⁸

“Those guys that have done that, they make plays. Terence Garvin is crossing his ts dotting his is⁹ and he’s making plays.”

Follow-up question: “You talked a while back about sooner or later these safeties would all be on a string¹⁰ — and it’s a lot to ask a young guy like him to do that. What, from the recruiting to kind of elevating him, did you know about him, did you project about him that it would happen quickly?”

Answer: “He’s an honor student in a very demanding school¹¹. His mom and daddy drove him 45 minutes a day to put him in a parochial school in D.C. – that’s one way – since seventh grade¹². Tells me a lot about the character of a young man. ¹³

I liked the way he played football. He’s a hitter. Great, soft-spoken young man. A big, a big team guy. And the best thing is I’ve got Sidney Glover right up his fanny¹⁴. I saw Sidney, man, the other day. I looked out there and said, ‘What in the world is going on?’ Sidney jumped down to spur. He got a little mad, Sidney. He said, ‘Switch. I’m going down there and get after it.’ That told me a lot about Sidney Glover’s character¹⁵. Robert Sands. Those three are just, they’re on a string. They’re really starting to play. And they give the defense fits¹⁶.

“I mean, guys it was third-and-22. Let me tell you about our safeties and our defense. It was third-and-22¹⁷. Syracuse comes out with two tights and two backs. Ran the zone. It’s third-and-17. Syracuse came out in two backs – two tight ends, one back – ran the zone.¹⁸ They wouldn’t – and we had our nickel and our dime in. Bruce Irvin had, what, six plays? ¹⁹ We couldn’t get them.

“They just, very content. ‘Let Rob Long punt.’ When the Mountaineers didn’t score, everything was going just like South Florida for them. And that’s what happened.^20″

And breathe. Let’s tiptoe through the footnotes.

1. On many mornings, you can catch West Virginia’s assistants walking around campus. Bill Stewart and Steve Dunlap walk together a bit. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll see Dunlap riding a bike.

2. Correct. Garvin has 39 tackles, four more than linebacker Anthony Leonard and eight more than linebacker J.T. Thomas. His 19 solo tackles are second only to bandit safety Sidney Glover’s 20, and his 20 solo tackles are the most on the team.

He also has the very unusual stat of zero interceptions and five interception return yards from when Keith Tandy intercepted a pass and fumbled the return. Garvin scooped it up and ran about 30 yards all over the field to gain five.

3. Funneling is narrowing a gap that offensive opponents run through and encouraging that runner in a particular direction, typically toward a  defender. Generally, defensive linemen funnel hits to linebackers. If a safety is making a lot of tackles, that’s normally an indictment of the front seven. We’re again reminded WVU’s defense is not a normal defense.

Garvin plays the spur position, which is something like another linebacker, and has to play the pass and near the line of scrimmage. And some NFL personnel I’ve spoken with like the 6-foot-3, 215-pound Garvin as a linebacker prospect.

4. Leonard was the defensive champion for his performance against Syracuse, but watch out for Bobby Weston!

5. Being too club-footed would be worse then being just club-footed. Also, I have no idea if Leonard has a club foot or club feet. It never occurred to me before.  

6. Leonard, in my opinion, is the team’s best individual story this season. He’s played well and there was a time when you would have thought he’d just never put it together and keep it together at WVU.

7.  What stood out most about Stewart’s weekly Tuesday press conference was how he opened by inviting questions about Syracuse in hopes of moving forward and then spent most of the next 28 minutes revisiting the Syracuse game and explaining his team’s defeat in a similar manner. This was one example of him going out of his way to make his point. I sense this loss bothers Billy very much.

Oh, and this is where I realized I need to ask a follow-up question.

8. Six of the top 25 teams in the Associated Press top 25 loss Saturday. Four lost to ranked teams: No. 3 Oklahoma to No. 18 Missouri, No. 6 LSU to No. 5 Auburn, No. 13 Iowa to No. 10 Wisconsin and No. 17 Oklahoma State to No. 14 Nebraska. No. 22 lost to Syracuse and No. 22 Texas Lost to Iowa State – and those were at home.

9. Good thing he is, otherwise he’d be lerence Garvln.

10. We decoded that last week.

11.  That’d be Loyola Blakefield High, which is a very esteemed institution.

12. LBHS is in Towson, Md., but still a pretty good haul from Garvin’s home in Baltimore. My rule of thumb when driving to or from Baltimore: Double the expected travel time.

13. Not only was Garvin plucked from Baltimore and dropped in a Catholic school, but it was his parents’ decision. He grew to like it and he understood not only that he had to live up to the sacrifices involved for everyone, but that he could actually gain a whole lot from the experience if he applied himself.

14. Serious.

15. The example set by Glover is one of taking action. He sees you do something wrong and he’ll do it right. It’s contagious.

As a matter of fact, my wife was working with her camera the other night and took the memory card guard out of the laptop so she could insert the memory card. When she was done, she put the guard back in … backward. She fiddled with it and was flummoxed until I said, “Give me that.” I gaffled the laptop, went down to the work bench – no, really – and removed the guard with long nose pliers. Thank you, Sidney.

16. He meant offense.

17. This was followed by a six-second pause.

18. I mentioned this Saturday, but in the second half, Syracuse was ahead and happy with that. The offense would get to third down and run. On the two occasions, it was what we’d consider third-and-long and probably a passing down. Twice the Orange ran and succeeded once and just missed another time. Later, it was third-and-long again, as Stewart noted, and Syracuse chose to run two more times.

19. Syracuse arrived at third down two more times later and WVU just kept its base personnel on the field to stop the run rather than switch to a pass/pass-rush defense. This kept Irvin and the SWAT and 40 packages off the field because WVU realized those were more susceptible to the run than the base defense.

20. Terence Garvin is a valuable part of a defense that opponents have learned to respect. Why, rather than allow the Mountaineers to dictate at points in the game and substitute favorable packages, the Orange chose to keep the upper hand and avoid negative plays from holding penalties, sacks or turnovers. They instead ran the ball and, if needed, let Rob Long, the best punter in the league, tip field posiion in the favor of his defense.

Given the options, Syracuse liked its defense guarding a long field against a misfiring WVU offense.

It was similar to the plan the Orange followed in a 13-9 victory against South Florida, a game in which the Bulls trailed 14-3 and scored on a kickoff return and chose to go for a 2-point conversion with plenty of time remaining because it was clear a touchdown drive would be difficult to come by against Syracuse.